Robert Silverberg - The Artifact Business

“Don’t make it hard for me, Jarrell. This is only my job.”

I threw one of the tens to the waiting Dolbak, nodded curtly, and walked out.

I returned to my meager dwelling on the outskirts of the Terran colony in a state of deep dejection. Each time I handed an artifact over to Zweig—and, in the course of the eighteen months since I had accepted this accursed job, I had handed over quite a few—I felt, indeed, a Judas. When I thought of the long row of glass cases my discoveries might have filled, in, say, the Voltus Room of the British, I ached. The crystal shields with double handgrips; the tooth-wedges of finest obsidian; the sculptured ear-binders with their unbelievable filigree of sprockets—these were products of one of the most fertile creative civilizations of all, the Old Voltuscians—and these treasures were being scattered to the corners of the galaxy as trinkets.

The amulet today—what had I done with it? Turned it over to—to a procurer, virtually, to ship back to Earth for sale to the highest bidder.

I glanced around my room. Small, uncluttered, with not an artifact of my own in it. I had passed every treasure across the desk to Zweig; I had no wish to retain any for myself. I sensed that the antiquarian urge was dying in me, choked to death by the wild commercialism that entangled me from the moment I signed the contract with the Company.

I picked up a book—Evans, The Palace of Minos —and looked at it balefully for a moment before replacing it on the shelf. My eyes throbbed from the day’s anguish; I felt dried out and very tired.

Someone knocked at the door—timidly at first, then more boldly.

“Come in,” I said.

The door opened slowly and a small Voltuscian stepped in. I recognized him—he was an unemployed guide, too unreliable to be trusted. “What do you want, Kushkak?” I asked wearily.

“Sir? Jarrell-sir?”

“Yes?”

“Do you need a boy, sir? I can show you the best treasures, sir. Only the best—the kind you get good price for.”

“I have a guide already,” I told him. “Dolbak. I don’t need another, thanks.”

The alien seemed to wrinkle in on himself. He hugged his lower arms to his sides unhappily. “Then I am sorry I disturbed you, Jarrell-sir. Sorry. Very sorry.”

I watched him back out despairingly. All of these Voltuscians seemed to me like withered old men, even the young ones. They were an utterly decadent race, with barely a shred of the grandeur they must have had in the days when the great artifacts were being produced. It was odd, I thought, that a race should shrivel so in the course of a few thousand years.

I sank into an uneasy repose in my big chair. About half past twenty-three, another knock sounded.

“Come in,” I said, a little startled.

The gaunt figure of George Darby stepped through the door. Darby was an archaeologist who shared many of my ideals, shared my passionate desire to see Earth, shared my distaste for the bondage into which we had sold ourselves.

“What brings you here so late, George?” I asked, adding the conventional “And how was your trip today?”

“My trip? Oh, my trip!” He seemed strangely excited. “Yes, my trip. You know my boy Kushkak?”

1 nodded. “He was just here looking for a job. I didn’t know he’d been working with you.”

“Just for a couple of days,” Darby said. “He agreed to work for five per cent, so I took him on.”

I made no comment. I knew how things could pinch.

“He was here, eh?” Darby frowned. “You didn’t hire him, did you?”

“Of course not!” I said.

“Well, I did. But yesterday he led me in circles for five hours before admitting he didn’t really have any sites in mind, so I canned him. And that’s why I’m here.”

“Why? Who’d you go out with today?”

“No one,” Darby said bluntly. “I went out alone.” For the first time, I noticed that his fingers were quivering, and in the dreary half-light of my room his face looked pale and drawn.

“You went out alone?” I repeated. “Without a guide?”

Darby nodded, running a finger nervously through his unruly white forelock. “It was half out of necessity—I couldn’t find another boy in time—and half because I wanted to strike out on my own. The guides have a way of taking you to the same area of the Burial Ground, all the time, you know. I headed in the other direction. Alone.”

He fell silent for a moment. I wondered what it was that troubled him so.

After a pause he said, “Help me off with my knapsack.”

I eased the straps from his shoulders and lowered the grey canvas bag to a chair. He undid the rusted clasps, reached in, and tenderly drew something out. “Here,” he said. “What do you make of this, Jarrell?”

I took it from him with greet care and examined it closely. It was a bowl, scooped by hand out of some muddy-looking black clay. Fingermarks stood out raggedly, and the bowl was unevenly shaped and awkward-looking. It was an extremely uncouth job.

“What is it?” I asked. “Prehistoric, no doubt.”

Darby smiled unhappily. “You think so, Jarrell?”

“It must be,” I said. “Look at it—I’d say it was made by a child, if it weren’t for the size of these fingerprints in the clay. It’s very ancient or else the work of an idiot.”

He nodded. “A logical attitude. Only—I found this in the stratum below the bowl.” And he handed me a gilded tooth-wedge in Third Period style.

“This was below the bowl?” 1 asked, confused. “The bowl is more recent than the tooth-wedge, you’re saying?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. He knotted his hands together. “Jarrell, here’s my conjecture, and you can take it for as much as you think it’s worth. Let’s discount the possibility that the bowl was made by an idiot; and let’s not consider the chance that it might be a representative of a decadent period in Voltuscian pottery that we know nothing about.

“What I propose,” he said, measuring his words carefully, “is that the bowl dates from classical antiquity—three thousand years back, or so. And that the tooth-wedge you’re admiring so is perhaps a year old, maybe two at the outside.”

I nearly dropped the tooth-wedge at that. “Are you saying that the. Voltuscians are hoaxing us?”

“I’m saying just that,” Darby replied. “I’m saying that in those huts of theirs—those huts that are taboo for us to enter—they’re busy turning out antiquities by the drove, and planting them in proper places where we can find them and dig them up.”

It was an appalling concept. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “What proof do you have?”

“None, yet. But I’ll get it. I’m going to unmask the whole filthy thing,” Darby said vigorously. “I intend to hunt down Kushkak and throttle the truth out of him, and let the universe know that the Voltuscian artifacts are frauds, that the real Old Voltuscian artifacts are muddy, ugly things of no aesthetic value and of no interest to—anyone—but—us—archaeologists,” he finished bitterly.

“Bravo, George!” I applauded. “Unmask it, by all means. Let the greasy philistines who have overpaid for these pieces find out that they’re not ancient, that they’re as modern as the radiothermal stoves in their overfurnished kitchens. That’ll sicken ’em—since they won’t touch anything that’s been in the ground less than a few millennia, ever since this revival got under way.”

“Exactly,” Darby said. I sensed the note of triumph in his voice. “I’ll go out and find Kushkak now. He’s just desperate enough to speak up. Care to come along?”

“No—no,” I said quickly. I shun violence of any sort. “I’ve got some letters to write. You take care of it.”